Scot Harvath - 04 - Blowback by Brad Thor

Author:Brad Thor [Thor, Brad]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Mystery, Suspense, Suspense Fiction, General, Thrillers, Political, Adventure Stories, Espionage, Terrorism, Thriller, Americans, Middle East, Political Science, Political Freedom & Security, Politics, Harvath, Scot (Fictitious character), Americans - Middle East
ISBN: 9781416505419
Google: iUbns1P12BAC
Amazon: 1416505415
Goodreads: 40710
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 2004-12-31T13:00:00+00:00

FORTY-FIVE

As the ice shelf caved in, there was nothing Harvath could do to save her. Jillian was too far away. It was like watching someone fall through a frozen lake. As her screams echoed off the side of the mountain, Harvath was tempted to look back, but his instincts had taken over and he was totally focused on saving himself.

Flattening his body against the upper peak of the shelf, Harvath slid his ice axes out from their holsters and swung them, along with his crampons, into the ice as hard as he could. Behind him, he could hear the sickening sound of the shelf as it wrenched the rest of the way away and collapsed into the chasm below. At least twenty feet out from the face of the mountain, Harvath said a silent prayer that the receding hunks of ice and snow wouldn’t drag his safety line, and him, down into the frozen void.

He lay there waiting to be yanked off at any moment, but the moment never came. As the thunderous roar of the collapsing shelf subsided, Harvath began to entertain the guilty thought that for the umpteenth time in his life, he had cheated death.

With his hands beginning to ache from the death grip he had on his axes, he knew he needed to come up with some sort of a plan, the crux of which had to be getting to Jillian to see if she was still alive.

Looking down, Harvath saw that only about two and a half feet of shelf still remained below him. From the edge of it to the face of Mount Viso, where they had rappelled down with their first set of ropes, was about eighteen feet. The shelf which Harvath had crossed, and which had swallowed up Jillian, had been nothing more than a fragile bridge of ice and snow that covered over the entrance to a deep cavern of blue-green ice. Even though his anchor was firmly established on the far mountain wall, using his rope to swing out over the open expanse, Tarzan-style, was not the best of ideas. Eighteen feet might not seem like much, but it was plenty of distance in which to pick up a full head of steam and slam into the other side. He immediately struck it from his list of possible options.

Ice chasms in general were like a big V, wide at the top and progressively narrower as you got toward the bottom. If one were to imagine a huge triangle with its point downward, it would form a pretty good picture of what things had looked like before the shelf had collapsed. Harvath now stood at the top of the chasm looking across to where his rope was anchored on the other side. Since swinging across was out of the question, the only way he could go was down. The problem, though, was that if he established another set of anchor points on this side, when he wanted to climb back up he’d still be on the wrong side of the cavern with no way to get across.

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